The prices of oil, gold, and other commodities spiked at midyear. High fuel prices and tight credit markets devastated American automakers and pressured airlines and aircraft manufacturers. The credit-market crisis also embroiled the financial sector and utilities and contributed to a slumping economy.

Automobiles

The American automotive industry began 2008 in precarious condition, and as the year unfolded, the situation went from bad to worse. First, gasoline prices of $3.50 to $4 per gallon throughout much of the United States during the spring and summer of 2008 crushed the already-declining demand for sport-utility vehicles (SUVs), pickup trucks, and minivans. Then the credit markets dried up, which affected both automakers, whose borrowing costs spiked, and consumers, who faced tighter lender standards and a reduction in available leases. In June alone, automobile sales in the U.S. fell 18% year on year, and in October they fell 31.9%. By late in the year, facing the prospect of running out of cash, the heads of the Big Three automakers testified before the U.S. Congress to request billions of dollars in government-provided loans to stay afloat. Although the Senate turned down the companies, in mid-December U.S. Pres. George W. Bush drew on a fund primarily intended to help bail out the financial sector to provide General Motors and Chrysler up to $17.4 billion in emergency loans with strict conditions, such as a requirement to cut labour costs. Ford, in the best financial shape of the Big Three companies, opted not to take any federal assistance, but it supported the loans since a failure of either GM or Chrysler would also threaten Ford’s suppliers. The ongoing worldwide economic crisis helped push vehicle sales in the U.S. down more than 35% in December year on year, and total sales for 2008 were the lowest in about 50 years.

Although Ford experienced record quarterly losses on the heels of a $2.7 billion loss in 2007, it had a line of credit of about $11 billion that it had negotiated in 2006, and in March 2008 Ford completed the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover units to India’s Tata Motors, which netted Ford $2.3 billion. CFO Don Leclair and two board members abruptly left Ford in October, which suggested to analysts that the Ford family (which controlled 40% of shareholder votes) was attempting to tighten control over the automaker.

Since the late 1990s General Motors had bet heavily on the SUV for its profits, so when the sale of SUVs collapsed, GM was left stranded. In late 2007 its primary SUV plant, in Janesville, Wis., produced 20,000 SUVs per month, but a year later the monthly output was only about 3,000 SUVs, and the plant was slated to be closed. GM posted a loss of $15.5 billion in the second quarter, and by late in the year the company was losing cash at a pace of more than $1 billion per month. Although GM stood to gain from wage-and-benefit concessions that were negotiated with the United Auto Workers in 2007, those cuts would not take effect until 2010. After preliminary merger discussions with Ford collapsed in September, GM considered merging with its other Big Three rival, Chrysler. The deal would in theory create a new automaker with $250 billion in annual revenue, a 30% share of the American market, and—most important—about $30 billion in cash reserves. It would also likely entail massive layoffs and downsizing, since GM and Chrysler had several overlapping brands and competing production facilities. The proposed merger soon hit a wall, however, when GM and Cerberus Capital Management, Chrysler’s owner, said that they were unable to find investors and banks to provide financing for the deal. As GM struggled to become profitable, it received the first $4 billion of its federal assistance on December 31.

For Chrysler the proposed GM merger came when it also was running out of options. The automaker, which Cerberus had acquired in the spring of 2007, had cut production costs in anticipation of a market slowdown in 2008. The breadth of the market’s collapse, however, left Chrysler reeling, and the company said that it would lay off 25% of its white-collar employees by the end of the year. Over the first eight months of 2008, Chrysler lost $400 million as sales slipped by 24%. In September Cerberus approached Chrysler’s former owner, Daimler, about purchasing Daimler’s remaining 19.9% stake in Chrysler, and it later entered into negotiations with Japan’s Nissan and France’s Renault to form a manufacturing and development alliance, but no agreements were reached. Chrysler announced in mid-December that it was idling all 30 of its North American manufacturing plants for at least a month to save cash, and at year’s end the company anticipated soon receiving its initial $4 billion of federal assistance.

Japanese automaker Toyota profited from the stumbles of its American rivals and was set to outsell GM for the year and become the world’s largest automaker. Through June Toyota sold about 300,000 more vehicles than GM worldwide. Nevertheless, Toyota was far from immune to the collapse of the American market, and in December its vehicle sales in the U.S. were down almost 37%. By the end of the year Toyota forecast that it would report its first-ever annual operating loss.

Thanks to sales of passenger cars such as the Civic and Accord sedans, Honda’s sales in the U.S. were up 1.7% in the first eight months of 2008, but by year’s end it also had recorded a decline in sales, with a drop of 8.2% for the year.

Many European carmakers were hit with declining revenue as buyer demand worsened in the second half of the year. France’s Peugeot-Citroën experienced a 5.2% drop in its third-quarter sales and said that it would slash its European car production by 30%. Sweden’s Volvo’s net profit fell 37% in the third quarter, and the company noted that it had almost as many order cancellations as it did new orders.

The most dramatic growth potential in terms of new-car production and sales was in India and China. India swiftly emerged as a major production hub for small cars, including the Nano, introduced by Tata Motor’s chairman, Ratan Tata, in January. Among the manufacturers that were operating plants in India were Nissan and Suzuki from Japan and Hyundai from South Korea. In China overall car sales rose 7.3% for the year to about 6.8 million. China’s passenger-car sales shot up 24% in March alone, after foreign automakers introduced 13 new models in the first quarter. In three years China’s domestic car sales had expanded by more than half.

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